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Monday, April 23, 2012

Full disclosure: I didn’t just turn 50. No, not me. I actually recently turned 51. So I’m an old (read: old) hand at being 50.

I
spent much of my daydreaming time at 49 thinking of fun things to do to
celebrate turning 50, not knowing that due to family circumstances it was
actually going to be the saddest year thus far of my life, but as another
spring rolls around I’m once again contemplating making the most of my time in
this world.

Which probably should preclude doing things like compiling a list
of 50 things about 50, but this activity pleased my inner librarian/packrat,
and I like to keep on her good side.

So: 50 fifty-ish things about 50. Fingers crossed I stick
around long enough to do 100 things about 100.

1. There are—news flash—50 states in the Union.

2.That’s why there are 50 stars on the U.S. flag.

3. Hawaii is the 50th state, surely
therefore it is logical to go to Hawaii for your 50th.

4.Tin has 50 protons, so its atomic number is 50.

5.50 is the smallest number that is the sum of two
non-zero square numbers: 50 = 12 + 72 and also 52
+ 52. It is also the sum of three squares, 50 = 32 + 42
+ 52. And yes, I cribbed that straight from Wikipedia.

6.A jubilee year is a 50th year—so you
can honestly host a jubilee when you get to the half-century mark.

7.Reaching 50 years of marriage marks your golden
anniversary. So your 50th birthday can be considered your golden
anniversary with Life, or Earth, or something along those woo-woo lines.

8.50
is also apparently “the fifth magic number in nuclear physics,” a magic number
being “a number of nucleons, either protons or neutrons, such that they are
arranged into complete shells with the atomic nucleus.” (Thanks again, Wikipedia.)

9. "Fifty-fifty" means all's fair.

10. Just add a silent g, nobody
will notice: The Dutch word Kindercarnavalsoptochtvoorbereidingswerkzaamheden is 49 letters long and means "preparation activities for a children's carnival procession."
So your first 49 years could be seen as preparation activities for a
celebration, and that is how I will shoehorn this in because I couldn’t nail
down a 50-letter word.

11.In
2009, a racehorse received the name Fifty Fifty.

12.Every
8 seconds, another American turns 50.

13.Humans have 46 chromosomes. Among the living
things with 50 chromosomes are the kit fox, the striped skunk, and the
pineapple.

14.A total of 50 horses have won two-thirds
of the Triple Crown races (Kentucky Derby, Preakness, and Belmont Stakes).

15. 50 Miles of Art is a corridor that
runs through Missouri along which fine artists and crafters live.

16.In Pride
and Prejudice, Mr. Darcy intones, “And what is fifty miles of good road? Little more than half a day's journey. Yes, I call it a very easy distance.''

17. In 2009, a viper in a
Bhopal zoo gave birth to 50 baby snakes.

18. 50 gallons of fresh water
weighs about 417 pounds.

19. And 50 gallons is about
how much water a typical oyster filters in 1 day.

20. Which would make it a poor roommate for an elephant,which drinks about 50 gallons a day.

21. If you had a pet elephant, you’d be well advised to use the bathtub as its water bowl: a typical tub can
hold about 50 gallons.

22. That’s if the horse isn’t
using the bathroom: a typical horse produces about 50 pounds of manure a day.

23. But you could always use a
rain barrel, an aquarium, or a compost-tea brewer: these all come in standard
50-gallon models.

24. Sadly, the average
American guzzles about 50 gallons of soda

in a year.

25. This is half of 50.

26. A half-dollar equals 50
cents equals four bits.

27. 50-cent coins have been
minted nearly continuously since 1794, with only the penny being minted more
consistently.

28.An opossum has 50 teeth.

29.What the L? It means 50 in
Roman numerals.

30.In the brilliant movie A Town Called Panic, Cowboy and Indian
intend to build their friend Horse a barbecue for his birthday. They need 50
bricks, but accidentally order 50 million instead, leading to calamity.

31. The song “50 Million
Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong” was a hit in 1927. In 1975, Paul Simon climbed the
charts with “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover.”
Which makes me wonder, if 50 million Frenchmen each came up with 50 ways
to leave your lover, how many excuses
does that make?

32. Memory Lane in
Rogersville, Tennessee, is a town filled with 1950s buildings that is open to
the public just once a year.

33. Driving at speeds more than
50 miles per hour uses up a lot more fuel due to air resistance and, no doubt,
some complicated physics-and-math ratio that I don’t wish to deal with.

34. Perhaps this is why such animals as lionesses,
gazelles, racehorses, quarter horses, African hunting dogs, and wildebeests usually don’t hit a top speed of more than 50 miles per hour.

35. Ostriches run pretty darn
fast, too, plus an ostrich’s eye is about 50 mm in diameter. The tall bird also sports up
to 50 tail feathers.

36. A black tuna can swim at
speeds up to 50 miles per hour. And heck, it doesn’t even have to worry about
air resistance.

37. In a crowd of about 20 or
30 people, there is a 50 percent chance that somebody else in the room will
share your birth date.

38.Attack of the 50 Foot
Woman was made in 1958. She wasn’t 45 feet tall; she wasn’t 100 feet tall. 50
must be something special indeed.

39. Lego bricks celebrated their 50th
birthday on January 28, 2008. Since their invention in 1958, the company’s made
so many bricks that there are about 62 bricks for each person on the planet.
Which leads to questions such as, how many of them willingly share their Legos?
How many have they left on the floor for Mom to step on in bare feet in the
night? Have you ever seen a purple Lego brick?

40. A footbridge made of 50 tons of
recycled plastic crosses the Tweed River in Peebleshire, Scotland.

41. Perhaps another bridge can be
constructed from the 50 tons of trash once left behind after the Rose Parade
event in Pasadena, California.

43. Tegopelte was an ancient, giant cockroach-like creature that had
up to 50 legs.

44.It would probably have loved eating
Green Eggs and Ham, the eponymous meal of Dr. Seuss’s beloved book, which celebrated its 50th birthday on August 12, 2010. Seuss wrote it after his editor challenged him to write an “intelligent, entertaining” book that used just 50
words. Seuss not only got the
book written and published, but won $50 in the bet.

45. Plain old white eggs starred in Cool Hand
Luke, in which Paul Newman’s character swallows 50 hard-boiled eggs in one
hour.

46.In 2006, Dean Karnazes ran 50 marathons in
50 consecutive days, one in each of the 50 states.

47. A refrigerator typically hums at 50 decibels.

48. Although the actual social-scientist method for
determining the divorce rate has it topping out at 41 percent of marriages, the popular figure for the divorce rate is that 50 percent of all marriages end in
divorce.

49. You could fit 50 moons inside Earth if it were
hollow. And if you could ensnare and duplicate the moon.

Wednesday, April 11, 2012

The robin is widely acclaimed to be a harbinger of spring in the United States; a robin appearing in late winter inspires many people to share the news that they've spotted one and thus spring must be around the corner.

How the bird earned this reputation isn't clear. In many parts of the country (such as here in the Pacific Northwest), robins are year-round residents. In places where robins migrate farther south for the winter, robins moving south from Canada may take their place.

The robin/spring equation isn't even a holdover from English folklore, as far as I can tell. Long-ago settlers from England, wistfully recalling the flora and fauna of their country, dubbed the big, feisty American thrush a robin because it had a russet breast like the spunky little English robin back home (which was once classified with thrushes but is now grouped with flycatchers).

But English robins, like many American ones, typically stick around for the winter (and are known for singing in fall and winter).

White-crowned sparrow, Magnuson Park, July 2011.

To me, it's the sweet, clear call of the white-crowned sparrow that signifies spring's arrival. White-crowns hang around all winter in the Puget Sound region, but I usually don't hear this little bird's melody until a Saturday in April, when it rings from the thickets striping the farmland near the stable that's our second home.

The white-crowned sparrow has starred in many studies seeking to unravel the mysteries of birdsong. Much of what we know about how birds learn to sing and birdsong dialects is based on research involving this species. Yet its plaintive melody hasn't yet been rendered in handy mnemonic-device form, unlike the "Poor Sam Peabody, Peabody, Peabody" of its cousin the white-throated sparrow or the "Quick, three beers!" of the olive-sided flycatcher.

Any existing efforts labor just to catch the rhythm of the song--it's translated variously online as "poor-wet-wetter-chee-zee" or "more, more, more cheezies, please pink!", making it sound like it's after Cheetos rather than singing a melody that, to me, is like a balmy, languid, summer afternoon distilled into notes on a flute.

Field guides, alas, aren't much help. David Allen Sibley's white-crowned sparrow is a "doodly-doo, I don't know the words" kind of singer that trills "feeee odi odi zeeee zaaaa zoooo." The Audubon field guide sternly declares that the bird's song "basically consists of a clear introductory whistle followed by 4-8 whistles or wheezy trills on different pitches." The Kaufman guide simply states that the song "varies, with local dialects" and usually includes "clear whistles and buzzy or trilled notes."

Author-ornithologists seem to have more leeway when they write outside the confines of a field guide (which of course must use words sparingly so that the physical book doesn't get so cumbersome it can't be carried into the field).

Naturalist and conservationist John Burroughs, for example, who lived from 1837 to 1921, called the white-throat's melody a "sweet, quavering ribbon of song" that was the "most plaintive of all the sparrow songs." In expressing its sound, he notes that "it begins with the words fe-u, fe-u, fe-u, and runs off into trills and quavers like the song sparrow's, only much more touching."

Songs of the white-crowned sparrow do vary from place to place and subspecies to subspecies, and these distinctions were keenly observed by ornithologist William Leon Dawson (1873-1928). In his voluminous Birds of California, he describes one subspecies' song of "oh hee sween'tie chup ichin'" as having in it "the sprightliness of springing heather, the bright, compelling cheer of sunshine battling with glaciers for imprisoned waters, and a little of the wistfulness, withall, of whispering pines."

Another species trills "Hoo hooee, wheeoo hoo che wee che wee hee, chee oo chee chee wee che" (after which Dawson notes, "These imitations are very stupid, of course--about as expressive of Zonotrichian melody as a naked wire dummy is of a man." (The bird's genus is Zonotrichia.) A third subspecies, the one living in Seattle, he chides as a singer of a "prosy, iterative ditty" that ends with a trill of "a wooden quality which we may overlook in a friend, but should certainly ridicule in a stranger."

It was a northwestern bird's "prosy, iterative ditty" that led me to a white-crowned sparrow perched on the tippy-top of a conifer in a park on the Oregon coast in the early 1990s--it was a new bird for me (white-crowns are scarce back East where I grew up).

The next one I saw wasn't nearly as hard to spot: It had claimed the central courtyard of a local elementary school as its territory, and when I spent a few hours there as a volunteer cleaning and weeding, the sparrow hopped from tree to tree to supervise my work.

John James Audubon (1785-1851) had to work a lot harder to check out white-crowned sparrows (which he called "white-crowned finches"). "It is to the wild regions of Labrador that you must go, kind reader, if you wish to form a personal acquaintance with the White-crowned Sparrow," he wrote after an arduous trek through what sounds like a bog.

He then rhapsodizes about the sparrow's song:

"In such a place, when you are far away from all that is dear to you, how cheering is it to hear the mellow notes of a bird, that seems as if it had been sent expressly for the purpose of relieving your mind from the heavy melancholy that bears it down! The sounds are so sweet, so refreshing, so soothing, so hope inspiring, that as they come upon the soul in all their gentleness and joy, the tears begin to flow from your eyes, the burden on your mind becomes lighter, your heart expands, and you experience a pure delight....Thus it was with me, when, some time after I had been landed on the dreary coast of Labrador, I for the first time heard the song of the White-crowned Sparrow."

Of course, this didn't stop him from destroying a patch of habitat in his determined quest to procure a nest ("we returned with hatchets, cut down every tree to its roots, removed each from the spot, pulled up all the mosses between them, and completely cleared the place") and later shooting the "gentle and unsuspicious" nesting pair of birds.

Perhaps the white-crowns would agree that "oh, please, leave me be, be, be" might be a fair rendition of their song, but they're such friendly, cheerful little creatures that they'd be inclined to forgive Audubon his songbird slaughtering in the name of science. So I'll content myself with simply hearing "oh, spring's here at last, last, last."

Piccalilli Pie's a little of this, a little of that...

but mostly about animals, children's books, writing, cooking, baking, coffee and the need for, needle felting, random stuff I like, and words that would catch a magpie's eye if magpies could read. Which maybe they can and they're just keeping it a big secret.